Inside India's CAPTCHA solving economy

No CAPTCHA can survive a human that's receiving financial incentives for solving it, and with an army of low-waged human CAPTCHA solvers officially in the business of "data processing" while earning a mere $2 for solving a thousand CAPTCHA's, I'm already starting to see evidence of consolidation between India's major CAPTCHA solving companies.

No CAPTCHA can survive a human that's receiving financial incentives for solving it, and with an army of low-waged human CAPTCHA solvers officially in the business of "data processing" while earning a mere $2 for solving a thousand CAPTCHA's, I'm already starting to see evidence of consolidation between India's major CAPTCHA solving companies. The consolidation logically leading to increased bargaining power, is resulting in an international franchising model recruiting data processing workers empowered with do-it-yourself CAPTCHA syndication web based kits, API keys, and thousands of proxies to make their work easier, and the process more efficient.

Let's analyze the shady data processing economy of India, discuss exclusive photos of Indian workers breaking MySpace and Google CAPTCHAs, and take a tour inside the web applications of several Bangladesh based franchises, whose team of almost 1,000 international workers is actively soliciting deals for breaking Craigslist, Gmail, Yahoo, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook's CAPTCHA, promising to deliver 250k solved CAPTCHAs per day on a "$2 for a 1000 solved CAPTCHAs" rate.

One of the services in question is the India based decaptcher.com, which will allow you to retrieve its API once you put money in their PayPal account :

"Using the advertisement in blogs, social networks, etc significantly increases the efficiency of the business. Many services use pictures called CAPTCHAs in order to prevent automated use of these services. Solve CAPTCHAs with the help of this portal, increase your business efficiency now! Follow these steps:

The service is among the countless number of franchises operated by several of India's large data processing companies, making it harder, but not necessarily impossible to establish connection between them. At the beginning, mom and pop CAPTCHA services seeking to expand start participating in the franchise business model offered by the big companies that are no longer capable of executing the projects on their own, and so in a win-win-win situation for the big company, the franchise, and the customers, India's CAPTCHA solving economy is booming.

Moreover, the investments made in purchasing the PCs, the web proxies, the training and education of the staff by providing them with tips for increasing their CAPTCHA solving productivity, as well as the sophistication of the web based applications aiming to empower non-technical users, clearly explain why India remains the market leader in CAPTCHA solving, with thousands of legitimate data processing workers converted to CAPTCHA solvers.

From a legal perspective, the creativity of the marketers behind these services is simply amazing. Here come the socially oriented " CAPTCHA solving service aiming to serve the visually impaired, the fake academic looking for technical know-how in breaking Gmail's CAPTCHA for his research project, to the companies interested in helping you increase your business efficiency by allowing you to automatically abuse a particular service and reach more potential customers.

Data processing as a mentality is visible in all the applications a human CAPTCHA solver is using. Basically, there's no indication which service's authentication model they're currently abusing, CAPTCHA breaking is replaced with CAPTCHA solving making it look like it's a some sort of a challenge that they have to solve.

Recruitment of the people that would be later tested for whether on not they quality for the job by exposing them to CAPTCHAs from different services, and a timer running in the background, is mainly done through advertisements like the following :

* easy work
* no learning needed
* no investment needed
* weekly payout
* work from home
* work when you want
* flexible working hours
* highest rates in the industry

How serious is the CAPTCHA solving business in India? The following Indian advertisements of their CAPTCHA services clearly speak for themselves - business is good and they are in fact competing for projects :

24/7 support still like. We have 30 pc 90 worker & we have 300 captcha team. Your any captcha project we done quickly. We have high experience captcha worker

Sir, We have 10 systems with good typing skill workers. We can easily do 25k per day

I have 40 PCs and 55 Persons working in my office for data entry work. As 1 person can do 800 captcha entry per hour. We can deliver you good quantity with quality

Hello Sir, I will kindly introduce myself.. This is shivakumar.. we have a team to type capcthas 24/7 and we can type more than 200k captchas per day

WE ARE PROFESSIONAL CAPCHA ENTRY OPEATORS AND WE CAN DO EVEN 25000 ENTRIES PER DAY AS MY COMPANY IS A 25 SEATER FIRM SPEALISED IN DATA ENTRY

Our Team is very much interested in your project and we could easily handle more than 50,000 captcha entries per day

We having more then 10 teams,we are operating 24/7 data entry works and delivering 700k/day captchas daily

I have a team of 7 people, willing to do captchas at $2 per 1000 entries. Please consider my bid. We can definitely provide 50K captchas per day

I have 40 PCs and 55 Persons working in my office for data entry work. As 1 person can do 800 captcha entry per hour. We can deliver you good quantity with quality

My team is equipped to offer the services. 20 person team, T1 business speed internet with an on hand technical staff. We are able to start right away

Dear Sir I am an expert in account creation, will provide you the accounts as per your requirements.I ensure the guaranteed satisfaction always. I charge only $40/1000

captcha typing teams for 24/7 ready. Rate $1.25 for 1K, up to 100K captchas per day

1$ per 1K of entries, and ready to produce 50 K entries per day. Kindly look forward procedures to provide the chance to us

My rate $4.00 per 1k My team can work 24/7. They are jobless now

$3 per 1000 image entry, Ready start. 24/7 service like also. We have 30 pc 90 worker & 39 big captcha team so your any target we solve

Dear Sir, We have quoted 50 $ per 50000 entries., Kindly look forward procedures to provide a chance to work with you

700,00 broken CAPTCHA per day would be surreal, unless of course we take into consideration the consolidation and franchising among the smaller groups of CAPTCHA "experts". Another advertisement from a relatively bigger company is forwarding the responsibility for downtime to MySpace, which according to them is often down so that they cannot do their job as efficiently as their infrastructure allows them to :

"This is long term project Rate is 1.50$ / 1000 entry. We need teams that can do 24/7 captcha entry. We are looking for individual teams to provide 10,000 to 200,000 entries per day per team. We require 90% accuracy and avg entry time less than 10 seconds. Real time stats. 3x a week pay via paypal only. $1.50/1k or best bid. Outsourcing is allowed. Teams that can provide 24 hour service will be preferred. Don't west your and our time!!

Our captcha system is very complex and complicated. It is built to process up to one million captchas per day. We have several big teams and hundreds of active agents solving captchas, all at one time, especially during daytime in India. The backend of this project involves over 45 powerful, expensive servers communicating with the MySpace site to pull the captchas and then queue them up on this site, and then process the results to push back to MySpace all within 20 seconds per captcha.

We run into many slowdowns. The most common bottleneck is that MySpace itself is often bogged down, slow and error prone, which then makes it very difficult for our servers to pull captchas quickly. Also much of the work on our servers is handled internationally, so the Internet connections have lag time.

Usually when the server takes a long time to show a new captcha, it is waiting for our other servers to pull another captcha. Sometimes 100 or more agents are waiting at the same time, so the queue only goes to one agent at a time. We recommend you try to work during afternoon and evening USA times (night time in India).

We are constantly trying to improve the speed of our site. We also continue to grow with expanding captcha teams and agents. Scaling our site is time consuming and expensive so implementation is not an immediate process."

Consider going through several other India based CAPTCHA solving companies, targeting multiple different CAPTCHAs, but also, clearly emphasizing on Google's while working on a Google related project :

The bottom line - is text based CAPTCHA dead? It's definitely in pain thanks to evil marketers recruiting low-waged Indian data processing workers, who according to some of the statistics obtained, earn over ten times more while solving CAPTCHAs, than through their legitimate data processing jobs.